Urban governance in the South of Europe: cultural identities and global dilemmas

Abstract

The concept of governance has been evolving into one of the most important but also dubious concepts in urban politics. The enlightening perspectives of cooperation, participation and collective construction are accompanied by shadowed fears of public demission, oligarchic regimes and less local democracy. These lights and shadows and the dilemmas they bring along are particularly relevant when observing the cities of the south of Europe, whose socio-cultural specificities very much structure local political and policy materialisations. Joining urban Mediterranean socio-political and cultural perspectives — including when gaining cosmopolitanism, and thus reducing North-South dualisms — this paper proposes a systematisation of governance tendencies and directions for deeper analysis of the Mediterranean urban world.